How to make your PowerPoint slide deck look harmonious

If you are like most presenters, your PowerPoint slide deck is made up of slides from different presentations. Learn how to do this without messing up the slide design!

The issue with Copy and Paste of slides

A lot of presenters have the habit of picking slides from different presentations.

For example, when they want to put together a company presentation, they pick their…

Finance numbers from a presentation made by Finance team

Organization chart slides from a presentation made by the HR team

Process maps from a presentation used by the training team

…and so on.

Naturally, when you copy slides from different presentations onto your own presentation, your slide deck begins to look like this.

When your slide deck looks like a weird animal with the head of a tiger, neck of a giraffe, body of a cow and the hind part of a Llama, your audience get annoyed and tune out.

So, what can you do to make your slide deck look harmonious and consistent, even if you include slides from multiple presentations?

3 Steps To Keep Your Slides Looking Consistent

Here are three simple things you can implement in your next presentation:

Don’t keep the source formatting

When you insert a slide from a different presentation, you make sure that you don’t pick up the formatting of the slide along with it.

So, leave the box next to ‘Keep source formatting’ option under ‘Reuse slides’ as unchecked.

Thus, the new slide will follow the same formatting as your own presentation. The newly inserted slides will merge with your slide look and feel. This allows your slide deck to look consistent.

Rewrite the text with your own words

Different people express the same idea in different ways. They tend to apply their unique style of expression on their PowerPoint slides as well.

When you pick up slides from different slide decks, this difference in styles becomes quite apparent.

The only way to avoid that style overlap is to apply one consistent style across all the slides.

That is why, it is worth the effort to rewrite the text on the imported slides, so they match the style of the rest of the presentation. This ensures that your slide deck hangs together, instead of looking like a potpourri of written styles.

Make internal references to the earlier slides from your slide deck

When you make visual or contextual references to your earlier slides inside your own presentation deck, you’ll make your audience feel that they are watching the same presentation, instead of getting glimpses from multiple presentations.

That’s all.

These are simple things to do but they can go a long way in making your slide deck look consistent and harmonious.

Did you like the ideas from this article? Want to learn more?

If are truly interested in taking your average PowerPoint slides to professional level, I recommend you take a look at our ‘Ramgopal’s PowerPoint Mastery Program’. It is the most comprehensive and creative PowerPoint training online for Business presenters.